Hibo Wardere

Hibo Wardere was born and raised in Somalia where, aged just six years old, she was taken one morning, unsuspecting, into a gathering of women and cut.

She moved to London as a teenager in the shadow of the Somalian Civil War, and discovered that this ritual, so embedded in Somalian culture, was not the ‘norm’ in the West.

So began her journey to understand FGM and its roots.

Today, Hibo is a teacher, a mother and a grassroots anti-FGM campaigner.

Books

CUT

Hibo Wardere with Anna Wharton

Imagine for a moment that you are six years old. You are woken in the early hours and led into an unfamiliar tent at the bottom of your garden. There you are pinned down and subjected to the cruelest cut, ordered by your own mother.

Forced down on a mattress, her legs held apart, Hibo Wardere was made to undergo female genital cutting – a procdeure so brutal that it could have killed her. With an inherent understanding that what had been done to her was wrong, she later moves to London to escape the country that betrayed her and embarks on a journey to understand FGM and its roots. But Hibo is shocked to discover the devastating truth about FGM in Britain.

Eloquent and searingly honest, Cut is her brave attempt to expose a medieval practice being carried out in the 21st century.